This forum is now a read-only archive. All commenting, posting, registration services have been turned off. Those needing community support and/or wanting to ask questions should refer to the Tag/Forum map, and to http://spring.io/questions for a curated list of stackoverflow tags that Pivotal engineers, and the community, monitor.

As the leading full-stack Java/Java EE application framework, Spring delivers significant benefits for many projects, reducing development effort and costs while improving test coverage and quality.

This stable, production-grade release comes after 9 months of active development. In this short time the Spring 2.x series has matured immensely, benefiting from over 150,000 early access downloads across 9 milestone releases, resulting in over 750 JIRA issues resolved, 50 of which introduce major new features.

What's New?

We believe three attributes capture what our users can expect from the Spring 2.0 series: Simple, Powerful, and Proven.

Version 2.0 brings major new simplifications to the framework's overall usage model. As our existing users know, the heart of Spring is the Bean Container which drives the configuration of your Java and Java EE application. In version 2.0 many common configuration tasks have been simplified through the introduction of custom Bean Configuration Dialects. What does this mean to you?

This means you can now:

Make your business services transactional in one-line of configuration code.

Lookup objects from JNDI in one-line of configuration code.

Expose externalized properties to your services in one line of configuration code.

Version 2.0 builds on the foundation set by Spring 1.x. This new release delivers major new functionality while preserving backwards compatability as far as possible.

With over one million downloads since its release in March 2004, Spring 1.x made developing sophisticated applications from plain Java Objects (POJOs) the de-facto standard. The 2.x series builds on this widely-recognized best-practice to deliver new simplification and power while preserving full compatiblity with the established Spring 1.x series. Users can expect their upgrade to be straightforward; in most cases, simply a matter of replacing the 1.2.8 JAR files with those included in Spring 2.0.

Enjoy, and thank you

Spring 2.0 represents the cumulative effort of many over the last year. From the lead developers Juergen, Rob, Rick, and Costin at Interface21, to our supporting partners BEA and Oracle, to the many in the community contributing innovations, patches, documentation, bug reports, and tests--there is a lot of blood, sweat, and tears here. We truly hope you find this new version as much a joy to use as it was for us to build. Enjoy, and rest assured: the work doesn't stop here.

Comment

I do not know whether this is right place for a request, but Maven repository does not contain sources and javadoc jars for Spring 2.0. These jars are very useful for development and debugging purposes. I am sure all Spring Framework users running Maven would be grateful if somebody from Spring team prepared these jars.